ich they appear will
for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again."

But Browning's ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and
nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to
lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the course of
1841 Macready intervened with a request for another play from the author
of _Strafford_.[19] Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity _A
Blot in the 'Scutcheon_. After prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room
vicissitudes, it was performed on Feb. 11, 1843. Macready, its first
begetter, did his best to wreck it; the majority of the players refused
to understand their parts; but through the fine acting of Helen Faucit
(Mildred) and Phelps (Lord Tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief
success.

[Footnote 19: The date is fixed by Browning's statement (Orr, p. 119).]

The choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a desire to make
terms with stage tradition. But the ordinary theatre-goer, who went
expecting to witness what the title appeared to promise, found himself,
as the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. An English
nobleman, with the deep-engrained family pride of his order, had
suffered, or was to suffer, dishonour. But this seemingly commonplace
_motif_ was developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmosphere--an
atmosphere of moral ideas which seemed to embrace both those who upheld
the feudal honour and those who "blotted" it; to hint at a purity deeper
than sin. In a more sinister sense than _Colombe's Birthday_, this play
might have been prefaced by the beautiful motto of its successor:--

"Ivy and violet, what do ye here
With blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather
Hiding the arms of Montecchi and Vere?"

The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the Tresham 'scutcheon, is
in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal
ambitions of Colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in
spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon
which at the close all animosities and resentments die away. The
conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them
all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which
none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and
naivete of Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether.
More mature or less sensitive lovers would